Poor management, appalling communication and a failure to deliver have blighted the integrating of Churchill and Direct Line IT systems, according to chief operating officer John O'Roarke.
Responding to a leaked internal survey that slammed RBS's handling of the integration process, O'Roarke gave his team just "three out of ten" for communication and admitted to a catalogue of errors.
He said: "If you were starting from here, you would not do it this way. The consultation process has been painfully long and, let's face it, we could have done better.
"What people are saying is give me some certainty as to when we can go. That's the bit we have failed to deliver on."
The survey of about 450 Churchill IT staff uncovered bad feeling, with employees accusing RBS of "destroying Churchill values", "lying" and "pure incompetence".
The survey shows that just 19% of staff were happy with internal communication and only a quarter felt motivated by the work they were doing.
Two further points to emerge were retention bonuses and the voluntary redundancy programme, variously described as "a joke" and "a farce".
As reported in Insurance Times, Churchill IT staff were told in October that all but a handful of them would be losing their jobs. Five months later, few know when and how they will be going.
O'Roarke said: "There is an argument that we opened the kimono too soon. We said it was all doom and gloom and you are all going to lose your jobs when it might have been more appropriate to say, for IT people, there will be a long 'business as usual' period."
According to O'Roarke, integration of Churchill IT was delayed by the simultaneous relocation of Direct Line's IT department to RBS headquarters in Edinburgh. He said the two operations created an impossible burden on available resource.
O'Roarke said: "There was the threat of industrial action on that move (Direct Line to Scotland), largely because of inadequate communication. It has left people feeling pretty unhappy. The big mistake we made on that was failing to appreciate just how important the severance package was to those people."
Going forward, O'Roarke promised senior management would engage more closely with IT staff to create a clear plan for the redundancy process.
He said: "The intention of this whole process was not to make IT staff unhappy. It has been an unfortunate side effect, but clearly you would not wish it that way."
In other areas of the company, such as claims, the integration process had progressed smoothly according to O'Roarke.
Full IT integration of the Churchill platform into the Direct Line system should now be complete by September, said O'Roarke.
